IBM's Roadrunner sets new supercomputer record

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 11 June 2008 08:29

IT Industry - Strategy

Talking of I/O, as we were, a total of 57 miles (92 kilometres) of fibre optic cable was needed for the Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet connections.

The system was assembled at IBM's plant in Poughkeepsie, New York, and will be delivered to Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico later this northern summer aboard 21 trucks. It "will primarily be used to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile" - simulation is more practical than real-life testing when you're dealing with that sort of thing.

As for the software, chalk up another one to the open source community: Roadrunner uses Red Hat Linux.